美国华裔子女汉语继承语教育现状与问题

Chinese Heritage Language Education for Children of Chinese Immigrants in America: Status Quo and Problems

继承语教育是美国应用语言学和外语教育研究的新兴学科。汉语目前已是美国第二大继承语,但是由于长期以来英语熔炉政策的桎梏,华裔移民面临着汉语继承语保持和传承的困境。基于此,从家庭、社区中文学校、K-12学校以及高等院校四个层面梳理和分析美国汉语继承语教育的现状,发现尽管近年来美国汉语继承语教育取得了快速发展,但仍存在以下主要问题:家庭中父母对汉语继承语教育存在高意愿与实践中低付出的落差,社区中文学校师资短缺且长期游离于主流学校之外,K-12学校对继承语教育重视程度不足以及高等院校汉语继承语教育与其他层次缺乏有效衔接。

Heritage language education is an emerging field of applied linguistics and foreign language research. Chinese has been the second widely-used heritage language in America.However, influenced by the longterm English monolingual policy, Chinese immigrants suffer a great language loss and their heritage language is in urgent need of maintenance. This paper explores the practices of Chinese heritage language education in four contexts: the home, community Chinese schools, K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities, and finds that although tremendous progress has been made in heritage language education, there still exists various challenges. The major challenges are in the home context where Chinese immigrant parents usually have high interest in their children’s Chinese maintenance but low support efforts in practice;community Chinese schools are excluded from the mainstream schools with a lack of human resources;K-12 schools attach little importance to heritage language maintenance;colleges and universities are in need of establishing the K-16 pipeline.